Introduction To Web Scraping From Semalt

23.05.2018

Introduction To Web Scraping From
Semalt

Web scraping is a technique of targeted automated extraction of relevant content from external websites.
However, this process is not only automated but also a manual one. The preference is on the computerized method
because it is much faster, much ef cient and less prone to human errors when compared to the manual approach.

This approach is signi cant because it enables a user to acquire a non-tabular or poorly structured data, and then
convert the same raw data from an external website into a well-structured and usable format. Examples of such
formats include spreadsheets, .csv les, etc.

In fact, scraping offers more opportunities than just getting data from external websites. It can be used to help a
user to archive any form of data and then track any changes made on the data online. For instance, marketing rms
often scrape contact information from email addresses to compile there marketing databases. Online stores scrape
prices and customer data from competitor websites and utilize them to adjust their prices.

Web Scraping in Journalism 1/2

Collection of report archives from numerous web pages;

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23.05.2018

Scraping data from real estate websites to track trends in the real
estate markets;

Collecting information pertaining membership and activity of
online rms;

Gathering comments from online articles;

Behind the web's facade

The core reason why web scraping exists is that the web is mostly designed to be used by humans and often, these
websites are designed only to display structured content. The structured content is stored in databases on a web
server. This is why computers tend to provide content in a manner that loads very quickly. However, the content
becomes unstructured when users add to it such boilerplate materials as headers and templates. Web scraping
involves using particular patterns that can enable a computer to identify and extract the relevant content. It also
instructs the computer how to navigate through this or that site.

Structured content

It is essential that before scraping, a user checks whether the site content provided accurately or not. Furthermore,
the content should be in a state where it can be easily copied and pasted from a website to Google Sheets or Excel.

In addition to that, it is vital to ensure that the website provides an API for purposes of extracting structured data.
This will make the process a bit ef cient. Such APIs include Twitter APIs, Facebook APIs and YouTube comments
APIs.

Scraping techniques and tools

Over the years, a number of tools have been developed, and now they are vital in the process of data scraping. As
time goes by, these tools and techniques are differentiated so that each of them has a different level of
effectiveness and capabilities.

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